World of Warcraft gives clues to
ward off global pandemic

23 August, 2007

Virtual online games can teach
epidemiologists lessons about how
infectious diseases and pandemics like
bird flu might spread in the real
world, as a recent bug in the online
game World of Warcraft has revealed.

The discovery, by two researcher in
the United States, has been published
in the September 2007 issue of the
journal The Lancet Infectious
Diseases.

The researchers are Eric T Lofgren
from the Tufts University Initiative
for the Forecasting and Modeling of
Infectious Diseases (InforMID), based
at Tufts University School of Medicine
in Boston, Massachusetts, and
Professor Nina H Fefferman from the
Center for Discrete Mathematics and
Theoretical Computer Science, at
Rutgers University, Piscataway, in New
Jersey.

They used computer simulations as a
research tool to model disease
outbreaks and pandemics, but they did
not incorporate the unpredictable
nature of human economic and social
behavior (such as that found in
virtual role-playing games) that are
difficult to validate.

The highly popular online role-playing
game World of Warcraft had a problem
recently when a programming error
caused a highly infectious disease
called ‘corrupted blood’ to spread
among the virtual characters which
included travelers, teenagers and
pets.

The disease soon spread to densely
populated cities in the virtual world,
with many deaths in the population.

What also interested the scientists
was the ‘social chaos’ that followed.
Some of the players welcomed this
unexpected feature of the game, but
the
game company tried its best to remove
the problem.

The company tried to deal with the
‘outbreak’ using a number of
quarantine procedures. But since the
‘disease’ was highly contagious and
since they could not seal off the
affected part of the ‘world’ and since
the players did not have enough
‘resistance, the only way to resolve
the problem was to reset the game,
wiping out any data relating to the
infection.

Lofgren, who was a participant in the
game, brought in Fefferman to observe
it. They found possibilities for
epidemiological research, since they
work with computer simulations of
disease.

The game suggested a missing factor,
the unpredictable nature of ‘stupid’
human behaviors like going in and out
of quarantine zones, or assuming that
they won’t be infected if they come
into contact with an infected person.

The researchers suggest that
epidemiologists could learn a lot by
integrating a controlled disease
outbreak into a game world as a way to
observe human reactions to disease.

This, they added, would have to be
done in such a way as to be part of
the user’s expected experience in the
game so that a reasonable simulation
of
real human behavior might be captured
within a model.

The online game environment brings
with it the advantage of large player
numbers. World of Warcraft, for
instance, has over 6 million players
worldwide.

Lofgren and Fefferman wrote in the
journal: “By using these games as an
untapped experimental framework, we
may be able to gain deeper insight
into the incredible complexity of
infectious disease epidemiology in
social groups.”

They are now working with a game
company to pursue the idea further in
a number of game environments.